p. 173 - 174The Limits of MicrocreditWhy didn't microcredit deliver more than it did? WI got a lot out of the chapters on microloans and microsavings.

p. 173 - 174The Limits of MicrocreditWhy didn't microcredit deliver more than it did? Why didn't more families start new businesses, given that they now had access to capital at affordable rates? In part, the answer is tha tmany poor people are not willing, or able, to start a business, even when they can borrow (why this is the case is one of the central themes of Chapter 9, on entrepreneurship). What is much more puzzling is that even though three or more MFIs were offering credit in the slums of Hyderabad, only about one-fourth of the families borrower from them, whereas more than one-half borrowed from moneylenders at much higher rates and that fraction was more or less unaffected by the introduction of microcredit. We don't claim to be able to explain to explain in full why microcredit is not more opular, but it probably has something to do with precisely what makes it able to lend relatively cheaply and effectively - namely, its rigid rules and the time costs it imposes on its clients. The rigidity and specificity of the standard microcredit model mean, for one thing, that since group members are responsible for each other, women who don't enjoy poking into other people's business don't want to join. Group members may be reluctant to include those they don't know well into groups, which must discriminate against newcomers. Joint liability works against those who want to take risks: As a group member you always want all other group members to play it as safe as possible.Weekly payments starting a week after the loan is disbursed are also not ideal for people who need money urgently but aren't exactly sure when they will be able to start repaying. MFIs do recognize this and sometimes make exceptions for emergency health-care expenses, but that is just one of the many possible reasons one might need an emergency loan. What happens, for example, when your son is suddenly offered a chance to take a course that would really help with his career, but the course fee is 1 million rupiah ($179 USD PPP), to be paid by next Sunday? Presumably, you borrow from the local moneylender, pay up, and then start looking for an extra job that will allow you to pay for the loan. Microcredit would not offer you this flexibility.The same requirement must also discourage taking on projects that only pay off after some time, since there needs to be enough cash flow every week to make the scheduled payments. Rohini Pande and Erica Field persuaded an Indian MFI, the Kolkata-based Village Welfare Society, to allow a randomly chosen set of clients to start their prescribed repayments two months after they got th eloan, instead of one week. When they compared the clients who got to repay later to those who stayed on the standard repayment schedule, they found that the former were more likely to start riskier and larger businesses, for example, buying a sewing machine instead of just buying some saris to resell. This presumably means that, down the line, they would be able to make more money. However, despite a clear increase in client satisfaction, the MFI decided to go back to its traditional model because the default rate in the new groups, though still very low, were 8 percentage points higher than under the original plan.One way to summarize all these results is to observe that, in many ways, the focus on "zero default" that characterizes most MFIs is too stringent for many potential borrowers. In particular, there is a clear tension between the spirit of microcredit and true entrepreneurship, which is usually associated with taking risks and, no doubt, occasionally failing. It has been argued, for example, that the American model, where bankruptcy is (or at least was) relatively easy and does not carry much of a stigma (in contrast with the European model, in particular), has a lot to do with the vitality of its entrepreneurial culture. By contrast, the MFI rules are set up not to tolerate any failure. Are MFIs right to insist on zero default? Could they do better, both socially and commercially, by setting up rules that leave scope for some default? Most leaders of the MFI communty firmly believe that this is not the case, and that relaxing their guard on defaults could have disastrous consequences."

p.184Why the poor don't save more"At this point, one common reaction is, "How could the poor save - they have no money?" But this is only superficially sensible: The poor should save because, like everybody else, they have a present and a future. They have little money today, but unless they expect to stumble on a pile of cash during the night, they presumably also expect to have little money tomorrow. Indeed, they should have more reason to save than the rich, if there is at least some possibility that, in the future, a little bit of buffer could shield them from a disaster. Such a financial cushion would, for example, allow the poor families in India's Udaipur District to avoid cutting meals when money runs out, something they claim makes them extremely unhappy. Likewise in Kenya, when a market vendor falls ill with malaria, the family ends up spending a part of the business working capital to pay for medicine, but that makes it hard for the recovering patient to go back to work because now he has little or nothing to sell. Couldn't they avoid all that if they had some money set aside to pay for the drugs?"...p.188"The fact that the poor have to subsititute for a lack of access to proper bank accounts by adopting complicated and costly alternative strategies to save might also mean that they save less than they would if they had a bank account. To find out whether this was the case, Pascaline Dupas and Jonathan Robinson paid the opening fees for a savings account at a local village bank, on behalf of a random sample of small business owners (bicycle taxi drivers, market vendors, carpenters, and the like) in Bumala. The bank had an office in the main marketplace where all these people operated their businesses. The accounts didn't pay any interest. Instead they charged a fee for each withdrawal. Few men ended up using the accounts that were offered to them, but about two-thirds of the women deposited money at least once. And these women saved more than comparable women who were not offered an account, invested more in their businesses, and were less likely to draw on their working capital when ill. After six months, they were able to purchase on average 10 percent more food for themselves and their family, day in and day out.... these poor clients would have had to pay a "tax" of nearly 10 percent for the privilege of having an account, not counting the withdrawal fees. To this, we have to add the cost for the poor of going to the bank, usually in a town center, far from where they live...The "self-help groups" popular in India and elsewhere represent one way to reduce costs, leveraging the idea that if members pool their savings and coordinate their withdrawals and deposits, the total amount in the account will be larger, and the bank will be happy to take it. Technology can also play a role. In Kenya, M-PESA allows users to deposit money into an account linked to their cell phones and then use the cell phone to send money to other people's accounts and to make payments. Someone like Jennifer Auma, for example, could deposit cash at one of the many local grocery shops that happens to be an M-PESA correspondent. This would credit her M-PESA account. She could then send a text message to her cousin in Lamu, who would be able to present the text message to his local correspondent to get his money. Once he gets the cash, the money would be deducted from her M=PESA account. Once M-PESA is linked to banks, people will be able to wire money in and out of their savings accounts using a local M-PESA correspondent, without having to trek all the way to the bank.Of course, no technology would remove the need for regulation of bank accounts. A part of the problem, however, comes from the fact that under the current regulations only highly paid bank employees are generally allowed to handle depositors' money. This is probably unnecessary. Instead, the bank could use a local shopkeeper to take deposits. As long as the local shopkeeper issues the depositor a receipt for the money that the bank is legally obligated to honor, the depositor is protected. Then it is the bank's problem to make sure that the shopkeeper doesn't run away with the saver's money. If the bank is willing to take that risk - and many banks would be happy to - then why should the regulator care? This realization has been percolating through the system in recent years, and a number of countries have passed new laws permitting this kind of deposit taking (in India, for example, this is called the Banking Correspondent Act).

p.191The Psychology of Savingsp.192"...Saving at home is difficult, they explained, because there is always something that comes up that requires money (someone is sick, someone needs clothes, a guest has to be fed), and it is hard to say no.Another farmer we met the same day, Wycliffe Otieno, had found a way to solve this problem. He always made the decision about whether or not to buy fertilizer just after the harvest. If the harvest was sufficient to pay for school fees and provide food for the family, he immediately sold the rest of his crop and used the money to purchase hybrid seeds, and if he had any leftover money, fertilizer. He stored the seeds and the fertilizer until the next planting season. He explained to us that he always bought the fertilizer in advance, because, like the Modimbas, he knew that money kept in the house would not be saved... We asked him what he did when he had already purchased fertilizer (but not yet used it) and someone got sick. Wasn't he tempted to resell it at a loss? His answer was that he never found the need to resell the fertilizer. Instead, he tended to reevaluate the true urgency of any need when there was no money lying around. And if something really needed to be paid for, he would kill a chicken or work a bit harder as a bicycle taxi driver... Although they had never purchased fertilizer in advance, the Modimbas had the same view. If a problem came up but they had no money (say, because they had purchased fertilizer), they would figure something out - perhaps borrow from friends or, as they put it, "suspend the issue"; but they would not resell the fertilizer. It was their opinion that it would be a good thing for them to be forced to find an alternative solution, instead of using the cash at home. ... (p. 196) Given this self-awareness, it is no surprise that many of the ways the poor save seem to be not only intended to keep the money safe from others, but also to guard it from themselves. For example, if you want to reach a goal (buy a cow, a refrigerator, a roof), joining a ROSCA where the total pot size is exactly enough to achieve that goal is a great option, because once you join, you are committed to contributing a certain amount every week or month, and when you get th epot, you have just enough to buy that thing you have been looking forward to buying, and you can do it right away before the money slips through your fingers.. Indeed, if the lack of self-control is sufficiently serious, it would be worth paying someone to force us to save. ... Desig...more

SO GOOD. political economy with a heavy dose of morality, all the different ways we talk about power.

p. 46 "[Mitchell-Innes and other] Credit TheorisSO GOOD. political economy with a heavy dose of morality, all the different ways we talk about power.

p. 46 "[Mitchell-Innes and other] Credit Theorists insisted that money is not a commodity at all but an accounting tool... You can no more touch a dollar or a deutschmark than you can touch an hour or a cubic centimeter...The obvious next question is: If money is just a yardstick, what then does it measure? The answer was simple: debt. A coin is, effectively, an IOU. Whereas conventional wisdom holds that a banknote is, or should be, a promise to pay a certain amount of "real money" (gold, silver, whatever that might be taken to mean), Credit Theorists argued that a banknote is simply the promise to pay something of the same value as an ounce of gold. But that's all that money ever is. There's no fundamental difference in this respect between a silver dollar, a Susan B. Anthony dollar coin made of a copper-nickel alloy designed to look vaguely like gold, a green piece of paper with a picture of George Washington on it, or a digital blip on some bank's computer. Conceptually, the idea that a piece of gold is really just an IOU is always rather difficult to wrap one's head around, but something like this must be true, because even when gold and silver coins were in use, they almost never circulated at their bullion value.How could credit money come about? Let us return to the economics professors' imaginary town. Say, for example, that Joshua were to give his shoes to Henry, and, rather than Henry owing him a favor, Henry promises him something of equivalent value. Henry gives Joshua an IOU. Joshua could wait for Henry to have something useful and then redeem it. In that case Henry would rip up the IOU and the story would be over. But say Joshua were to pass the IOU on to a third party - Sheila - to whom he owes something else. He could tick it off against his debt to a fourth party, Lola - now Henry will owe that amount to her. Hence, money is born, because there's no logical end to it. Say Sheila now wishes to acquire a pair of shoes from Edith; she can just hand Edith the IOU and assure her that Henry is good for it. In principle, there's no reason that the IOU could not continue circulating around town for years - provided people continue to have faith in Henry. In fact, if it goes on long enough, people might forget about the issuer entirely. Things like this do happen. The anthropologist Keith Hart once told me a story about his brother, who in the '50s was a British soldier stationed in Hong Kong. Soldiers used to pay their bar tabs by writing checks on accounts back in England. Local merchants would often simply endorse them over to each other and pass them around as currency: once, he saw one of his own checks, written six months before, on the counter of a local vendor covered with about forty different tiny inscriptions in Chinese. What credit theorists like Mitchell-Innes were arguing is that even if Henry gave Joshua a gold coin instead of a piece of paper, the situation would be essentially the same. A gold coin is a promise to pay something else of equivalent value to a gold coin. After all, a gold coin is not actually useful in itself. One only accepts it because one assumes other people will.In this sense, the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one's trust in other human beings. This element of trust of course makes everything more complicated... systems like these cannot create a full-blown currency system, and there's no evidence they ever have. Providing a sufficient number of IOUs to allow everyone even in a medium-sized city to be able to carry our a significant portion of their daily transactions in such a currency would require millions of tokens. To be able to guarantee all of the, Henry would have to be almost unimaginably rich. All this would be much less of a problem, however, if Henry were, say, Heny II, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Lord of Ireland and Count of Anjou. The real impetus for the Chartalist position, in fact, came out of what came to be known as the "German Historical School," whose most famous exponent was the historian G.F. Knapp, whose State Theory of Money first appeared in 1905. If money is simply a unit of measure, it makes sense that emperors and kings should concern themselves with such matters. Emperors and kings are almost always concerned to establish uniform systems of weights and measures throughout their kingdoms...If makes no real difference whether it's pure silver, debased silver, leather tokens, or dried cod - provided the state is willing to accept it in payment of taxes. Because whatever the state was willing to accept, for that reason, became currency...Modern banknotes actually work on a similar principle, except in reverse. Recall here the little parable about Henry's IOU. The reader might have noticed one puzzling aspect of the equation: the IOU can operate as money only as long as Henry never pays his debt. In fact this is precisely the logic on which the Bank of England - the first successful modern central bank - was originally founded. In 1694, a consortium of English bankers made a loan of L1,200,000 to the king. In return they received a royal monopoly on the issuance of banknotes. What this meant in practice was they had the right to advance IOUs for a portion of the money the king now owed them to any inhabitant of the kingdom willing to borrow from them, or willing to deposit their own money in the bank - in effect, to circulate or "monetize" the newly created royal debt. This was a great deal for the bankers (they got to charge the king 8 percent annual interest for the original loan and simultaneously charge interest on the same money to the clients who borrowed it), but it only worked as long as the original loan remained outstanding. To this day, this loan has never been paid back. If cannot be. If it ever were, the entire monetary system of Great Britain would cease to exist. If nothing else, this approach helps solve one of the obvious mysteries of the fiscal policy of so many early kingdoms: Why did they make subjects pay taxes at all? This is not a question we're used to asking. The answer seems self-evident. Governments demand taxes because they wish to get their hands on people's money. But if Smith was right, and gold and silver became money through the natural workings of the market completely independently of governments, then wouldn't the obvious thing be to just grab control of the gold and silver mines? Then the king would have all the money he could possibly need. In fact, this is what ancient kings would normally do... what exactly was the point of extracting the gold, stamping one's picture on it, causing it to circulate among one's subjects - and then demanding that those same subjects give it back again?... this is the simplest and most efficient way to bring markets into being... Say a king wishes to support a standing army of fifty thousand men... if one simply hands out coins to the soldiers and then demands that every family in the kingdom was obliged to pay one of those coins back to you, one would, in one blow, turn one's entire national economy into a vast machine for the provisioning of soldiers, since not every family, in order to get their hands on the coins, must find someway to contribute to the general effort to provide soldiers with things they want. Markets are brought into existence as a side effect."of course it doesn't need to be armies, it could be public education, it could be construction of infrastructure, any large scale mobilization. p. 50 "Stateless societies tend also to be without markets."

plenty, too, on the relationship with colonialism, the examples are the French and the Malagasy.

p.52"Money was no more ever "invented" than music or mathematics or jewelry. What we call "money" isn't a "thing" at all; it's a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y. As such it is probably as old as human thought."

p.52 DID NOT KNOW"L. Frank Baum's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform - vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. As with the Greenbackers, one of the main constituencies for the movement was debtors: particularly, Midwestern farm families such as Dorothy's, who had been facing a massive wave of foreclosures during the severe recession of the 1890s. According to the Populist reading, the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast bankers (promoters of and benefactors from the tight money supply), the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn't have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman was the industrial proletariat (who didn't have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn't have the courage to intervene). The yellow brick road, silver slippers, emerald city, and hapless Wizard presumably speak for themselves. "Oz" is of course the standard abbreviation for "ounce.""

p. 64 has the second typo/stupid grammar error.

p. 79 "... an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:

"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs."

The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt."

p.81 a historical context for debt forgiveness"Nehemiah was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup-bearer to the Persian emperor. In 444 BC, he managed to talk the Great King into appointing him governor of his native Judaea... The problem was that Nehemiah quickly found himself confronted with a social crisis. All around him, impoverished peasants were unable to pay their taxes; creditors were carrying off the children of the poor. His first response was to isue a classic Babylonian-style "clean slate" edict - having himself been born in Babylon, he was clearly familiar with the general principle. All non-commercial debts were to be forgiven. Maximum interest rates were set. At the same time, though, Nehemiah managed to locate, revise, and reissue much older Jewish laws, now preserved in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus... The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically canceled "in the Sabbath year" (that is, after seven years had passed).

p. 82 still talking about debt and freedom in judeochristian tradition"If so, "redemption" is no longer about buying something back. It's really more a matter of destroying the entire system of accounting. In many Middle Eastern cities, this was literally true: one of the common acts during debt cancellation was the ceremonial destruction of the tablets on which financial records had been kept, an act to be repeated, much less officially, in just about every major peasant revolt in history."

p. 86 "One does not see a similar outcry against caste systems, for example, or for that matter, the institution of slavery... Why was it that the debtors' protests seemed to carry such greater moral weight? Why were debtors so much more effective in winning the ear of priests, prophets, officials, and social reformers?... What makes debt different is that it is premised on an assumption of equality. To be a slave, or lower caste, is to be intrinsically inferior. We are dealing with relations of unadulterated hierarchy. In the case of debt, we are dealing with two individuals who begin as equal parties to a contract. Legally, at least as far as the contract is concerned, they are the same. ... One can imagine the reaction of a farmer who went up to the house of a wealthy cousin, on the assumption that "humans help each other," and ended up, a year or two later, watching his vineyard seized and his sons and daughters led away. Such behavior could be justified, in legal terms, by insisting that the loan was not a form of mutual aid but a commercial relationship - a contract is a contract... What's more, framing it as a breach of contract meant stating that this was, in fact, a moral issue: these two parties ought to be equal, but one had failed to honor the bargain.

p. 178 "In the very earliest Sumerian texts, particularly those from roughly 3000 to 2500 BC, women are everywhere. Early histories not only record the names of numerous female rulers, but make clear that women were well represented among the ranks of doctors, merchants, scribes, and public officials, and generally free to take part in all aspects of public life. One cannot speak of full gender equality: men still outnumbered women in all these areas... Over the course of the next thousand years or so... the place of women in civic life erodes; gradually, the more familiar patriarchal pattern takes shape, with its emphasis on chastity and premarital virginity, a weakening and eventually wholesale disappearance of women's role in government... This appears to reflect a much broader worldwide pattern. It has always been something of a scandal for those who like to see the advance of science and technology, the accumulation of learning, economic growth - "human progress," as we like to call it - as necessarily leading to greater human freedom, that for women, the exact opposite often seems to be the case... A similar gradual restriction on women's freedoms can be observed in India and China. The question is, obviously, Why?"tended to emphasize the growing scale and social importance of war, and the increasing centralization of the state that accompanied it... I would add another, complementary argument. As I have emphasized, historically, war, states, and markets all tend to feed off one another. Conquest leads to taxes. Taxes tend to be ways to create markets, which are convenient for soldiers and administrators. In the specific case of Mesopotamia, all of this took on a complicated relation to an explosion of debt that threatened to turn all human relations - and by extension, women's bodies - into potential commodities."

p. 256 - slavery and predatory lending in the caste system"The Laws of Manu carefully classify slaves into seven types depending on how they were reduced to slavery (war, debt, self-sale...) and explain the conditions under which each might be emancipated - but then go on to say that Sudras can never really be emancipated, since, after all, they were created to serve the other castes. Similarly, where earlier codes had established a 15-percent annual rate of interest, with exceptions for commercial loans, the new codes organized interest by caste: stating that one could charge a maximum of 2 percent a month for a Brahmin, 3 percent for a Ksatriya (warrior), 4 percent for a Vaisya (merchant), and 5 percent for a Sudra - which is the difference between 24 percent annually on the one extreme and a hefty 60 percent on the other."

p.257 - statute of limitations"Paying the principle might take generations, but the law stipulated that even if it was never paid, in the third generation, they would be freed."

p.258 - frequency of peasant rebellion"There were decades in Chinese history when the rate of recorded peasant uprisings was roughly 1.8 per hour."

p. 259 - Wang Mang seized the throne and fixed everything forever"Wang Mang instituted a program reforming the currency, nationalizing large estates, promoting state-run industries - including public granaries - and banning private holding of slaves. Wang Mang also established a state loan agency that would offer interest-free funeral loans for up to ninety days for those caught unprepared by the death of relatives, as well as long-term loans of 3 percent monthly or 10 percent annual interest rates for commercial or agricultural investments. "With this scheme," one historian remarks, "Wang was confident that all business transactions would be under his scrutiny and the abuse of usury would be forever eradicated."

p. 260 - Capitalism VS Markets"We're used to assuming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but, as the great French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, in many ways they could equally well be conceived as opposites. While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money - historically, ways for those with a surplus of grains to acquire candles and vice versa (in economic shorthand, C-M-C', for commodity-money-other commodity) - capitalism is first and foremost the art of using money to get more money (M-C-M'). Normally, the easiest way to do this is by establishing some kind of formal or de facto monopoly. For this reason, capitalists, whether merchant princes, financiers, or industrialists, invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market, so as to make it easier for them to do so. From this perspective, China was for most of its history the ultimate anti-capitalist market state. Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed)."...more

p.60"Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the ep.60"Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change."

P.87 The word as the essence of dialogue, "there is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world."Sacrifice of action = verbalismSacrifice of reflection = activism"Denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action."P.92 "Hope does not consist in crossing one's arms and waiting."

"Welfare programs as instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solution of these problems. They splinter the oppressed into groups of individuals hoping to get a few more benefits for themselves."...more

Exactly what I wanted from it- humorous, slightly patronizing, steeped in anecdotes and allegory. I learned the most from the framework of dominanceBeExactly what I wanted from it- humorous, slightly patronizing, steeped in anecdotes and allegory. I learned the most from the framework of dominanceBest sentence: p.235 "the women... were encouraged to perform karaoke, and other indecent acts."

P.264"Such behaviours as delayed reproduction, mate-guarding, inbreeding, birth control, infanticide (particularly of daughters), primogeniture, and generation-skipping trusts have all served in various times and places as the Darwinian tools of dynasty building."...more

Picked up from the shelf of my roommate who took Globalization and Social Conflict about five years before I did.

There are some beautiful sentences buPicked up from the shelf of my roommate who took Globalization and Social Conflict about five years before I did.

There are some beautiful sentences but overall it was the kind of book that used a permutation of "kaleidoscope" four times. I can't avoid feeling some scorn for books that are between 200 and 210 pages - really, you can both make your point and abide by the outline that had you finished at 200.

I didn't realize GCS included business. It makes sense, I guess, there are for-profit entities who enact positive social change. And by and large business prefers a politically stable, peaceful and predictable society. However, I had always conceived of GCS being set up in opposition to multinational corporations, and I certainly hold that there are companies and even industries who act to the detriment of civil society: war profiteers and other military-industrial complex groups, let alone big oil or Bechtel or corporations that incite conflict. In Keane's definition, GCS stands across from nation-states. In my world view the aims of GCS and the public sector overlap, and often work in concert.

p.26 - a historical model for sustaining agricultural infrastructure without migrant farm labor? like a CSA co-op built on contributions of labor-hours?(cites Mundy&Riesenberg's The Medieval Town)"Towns like Bruges, Genoa, Nurembers and London resembled electric transformers..[Town-dwellers] travelled regularly to and fro among built-up areas and regularly spent only part of their lives there; during harvest-times, for instance, artisans and others typically abandoned their trades and houses for work in fields elsewhere."

p.106 - "Clumsy government has all sorts of desirable features - like the power-sharing that comes with a plurality of institutions marked by 'useful inefficiencies' - certainly when compared with the unworkable normative ideal of designing institutions that are rigidly geometric in style and strategy."

p.118 - "a lack of public-friendly, well-trained administrative staff ensures that many parts of the cosmocracy are closed off from either mutual or public scrutiny of any kind. They come to feel like an impenetrable jungle of acronyms. Matters are worsened by the tyranny of distance: despite the noblest of public-spirited motives, decisionmakers tend to lose track of their decisions..."...more

Finishing this gave me a boost of energy to finally get through some job apps. Three down, three dozen to go...

things I liked about this book:the evolFinishing this gave me a boost of energy to finally get through some job apps. Three down, three dozen to go...

things I liked about this book:the evolution of a career that dealt with humanitarian aid, international politics, terrorism, nation-building, human rights advocacy civil society. Desk work vs field work. Working in a warzone vs at a refugee camp vs as a peace-keeper in an assumed post-conflict zone. the interplay between personal characteristic and professional skills - looking at Vieira de Mello's qualities that were alternatively strengths and fallibilities - he liked to be liked, he abhorred bureaucracy and deskwork, he was a charmer/flirt.

It must be a good book- I don't know how I feel about it! I was surprised by the mix of emotional responses I had to the author and his character in tIt must be a good book- I don't know how I feel about it! I was surprised by the mix of emotional responses I had to the author and his character in the memoir: contempt, admiration, suspicion, sadness, anger, envy, respect. Made me think about my dad, about classmates from grade school, about Globalization & Social Conflict, about dear friends who hurt me years ago, about my childhood as a privileged expat brat. About my personal + professional values and world endgame and income inequity and suffering and poverty and corporate abuse. Quite a ride. And I didn't expect to get much out of it, picking it up from a friend's shelf with skepticism.

If you don't make time for the whole piece, the preface packs a punch. It's not enough for you to trust the author's integrity in any way, but sets the terrain of ideas.

P. xiv"Some would blame our current problems on an organized conspiracy. I wish it were so simple. Members of a conspiracy can be rooted out and brought to justice. This system, however, is fueled by something far more dangerous than conspiracy. It is driven not by a small band of men but by a concept that has become accepted as gospel: the idea that all economic growth benefits humankind and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits. This belief also has a corollary: that those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born at the fringes are available for exploitation. "The concept is, of course, erroneous. We know that in many countries economic growth benefits only a small portion of the population and may in fact result in increasingly desperate circumstances for the majority. This effect is reinforced by the corollary belief that the captains of industry who drive this system should enjoy a special status, a belief that is the root of many of our current problems and is perhaps also the reason why conspiracy theories abound. When men and women are rewarded for greed, greed becomes a corrupting motivator. When we equate the gluttonous consumption of the earth with a status approaching sainthood, when we teach out children to emulate people who live unbalanced lives, and when we define huge sections of the population as subservient to an elite minority, we ask for trouble. And we get it."...more

"The common wealth has been used to build highways, develop the Internet and the satellite system, upholdslick justification of progressive taxation:

"The common wealth has been used to build highways, develop the Internet and the satellite system, uphold the banking system, regulate the stock market, and support the court system, which guarantees contracts. No business functioning in the market could exist without massive use of the common wealth. It is crucial to the existence and flourishing of markets. And those who benefit from markets have a moral obligation to replenish the common wealth."...more

p. 22 "There is wisdom in smallness if only on account of the smallness and patchiness of human knowledge, which relies on experiment far more than onp. 22 "There is wisdom in smallness if only on account of the smallness and patchiness of human knowledge, which relies on experiment far more than on understanding. The greatest danger invariably arises from the ruthless application, on a vast scale, or partial knowledge."

p. 38 "the modern economist has been brought up to consider "labour" or work as little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a "disutility"; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. Hence the ideal from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and the idea from the point of view of the employee is to have income without employment... The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence."

p.142"The established processes of foreign aid and development planning appear to be unable to overcome this tendency [of poor getting poorer and rich richer]. In fact they often seem to promote it, for it is always easier to help those who can help themselves than to help the helpless."

P.144 " for a poor man the chance to work is the greatest of all needs, and even poorly paid and relatively unproductive work is better than idleness. "Coverage must come before perfection," to use the words of Mr. Gabriel Ardant."

P.158 "which particular people? Where are they? Why do they need help? If they cannot get on without help, what, precisely, is the help they need? How do we communicate with them?"

P.166 "So we get back to our two million villages and have to see how we can make relevant knowledge available to them. To do so, we must first possess this knowledge ourselves. Before we can talk about giving aid, we must have something to give... The beginning of wisdom is the admission of one's own lack of knowledge. As long as we think we know, when in fact we do not, we shall continue to go to the poor and demonstrate to them all the marvellous things they could do if they were already rich."

P.172 "If people do not want to better themselves, they are best left alone- this should be the first principle of aid. Insiders may take a different view, and they also carry different responsibilities. For the aid-giver, there are always enough people who do wish to better themselves, but they do not know how to do it."

P.173 "Leo Tolstoy referred to it when he wrote: "I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back."

P.222 quoting Tawney"For it is not private ownership, but private ownership divorced from work, which is corrupting to the principle of industry; and the idea of some socialists that private property in land or capital is necessarily mischievous is a piece of scholastic pedantry as absurd as that of those conservatives who would invest all property with some kind of mysterious sanctity.' Private enterprise carried on with property of the first category is automatically small-scale, personal and local. It carries no wider social responsibilities. Its responsibilities to the consumer can be safeguarded by the consumer himself. Social legislation and trade union vigilance can protect the employee. No great private fortunes can be gained from small-scale enterprises, yet its social utility is enormous."

P.225 tawney again, from The Acquisitive Society "'precisely in proportion as it is important to preserve the property which a man has in the results of his labour, is it important to abolish that which he has in the results of the labor of someone else.' ... In a large-scale enterprise, private ownership is a fiction for the purpose of enabling functionless owners to live parasitically on the labor of others. It is not only unjust but also an irrational element which distorts all relationships within the enterprise."

Nationalised industries may have nationalised competitor industries!

P.240 "There appear to be three major choices for a society in which economic affairs necessarily absorb major attention - the choice between private ownership of the means of production, various types of public or collectivised ownership; the choice between a market economy and various arrangements of "planning": and the choice between "freedom" and "totalitarianism." Needless to say, with regard to each of these three pairs of opposites there will always in reality be some degree of mixture."...more

For the first 120 pages or so I figured the book was just anecdotal and oversimplifying - flaws but not sins. Then I got to "Just as abused children oFor the first 120 pages or so I figured the book was just anecdotal and oversimplifying - flaws but not sins. Then I got to "Just as abused children often abuse their own children, the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, blending ignorance, disdain, and brutality, may be linked to the scars the Israelis carry from the recent Jewish past."I do not tolerate books and authors who propagate misinformation. A small minority of abuse victims go on to perpetuate violence themselves. A distinct fact is that abusers are likely to have experienced an abusive past. ...more

more historical/chronological than I expected. Definitely Zinn-esque. Stays mostly on the macro level - war, state endorsed religion, American slaverymore historical/chronological than I expected. Definitely Zinn-esque. Stays mostly on the macro level - war, state endorsed religion, American slavery. My favorite factoids were about Emperor Constantine and Pennsylvania Quakers. Quick read, I made it through in an afternoon, and definitely worth the investment of time. ...more